LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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©Jraju fio{i^ng|J Ifo. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Remembrances 

of 
Phillips Brooks. 



This book was printed from type distributed after 
printing, and the edition consisted of sixty 
copies, of which this is No. 



REMCMBRANCeS OF 
PHILLIPS BROOKS 
BY TWO OF HIS 
FRI6NDS 



f 



BOSTON 
PRINTED FOR THE MEMBERS OF 
THE CLERICUS CLUB 
1893 



TfTrs y 







Copyright by 

C. A. L. Richards. 

1893. 



3 



Some Impressions 

of 

Phillips Brooks. 



C. A. L. Richards. 



Some Impressions of 
Phillips Brooks. 



A PAPER READ BEFORE HIS CLUB AT THE FIRST 
MEETING AFTER HIS DEATH. 



NOTE from our President has 
asked for recollections or appre- 
ciations of our dear friend about 
whom this club first clustered, 
who has been to us all its delight 
and glory ever since. The task 
falls to me as the one among us who knew 
him earliest. It seems fit indeed that an 
evening be given to his memory while our hearts 
are yet freshly burdened with his loss. The in- 




IMPRESSIONS OF 



adequacy of any tribute so hastily prepared is 
manifest. It can only furnish occasion for large 
supplementing in the talk that is to follow it. 
The attempt will be forgiven to preserve any 
least relics of what to us is so precious, the 
memory of our great dead. You will let me 
speak frankly and familiarly of what I personally 
saw and knew. 

It was in October, or perhaps, November, of 
the year 1856 that I first met Phillips Brooks. 
The term had already begun at the Alexandria 
Seminary. That first introduction was in the 
dark passageway of a building which, I believe, 
is no longer standing, the main building of the 
seminary group. It was a very plain, brick 
structure, three stories high, with three entries, 
having a front and rear room on both sides of 
each. The front rooms looked off over two or 
three miles of broken country, to the Potomac. 
Ten miles away to the left lay the city of Wash- 
ington. The front rooms in one entry were 
occupied at this time by students whose names 
it may be interesting to mention. Among them 
was Henry Wise the son of the fiery cross-roads 
orator, then Governor of Virginia. After a brief 
career in Philadelphia and in Richmond he died 
of consumption early in the war. Winslow 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



Seaver, after some years in our ministry, went 
over to the Methodists, hoping for a warmer 
climate, but upon a prolonged experiment, find- 
ing the temperature about the same and the 
quality of the air inferior, returned whence he 
set out. The Appleton brothers of Philadel- 
phia, whose external resemblance covered much 
distinctness of character, confronted Lucius 
Bancroft, of Providence and Christ-church, 
Brooklyn; a man from whom the greatest things 
were expected, so devout was his character and 
mature his attainments. The name of one other 
occupant of the rooms escapes me. There was 
one however, somewhat more a man of the world 
than any of us, who presently accepted the 
charge of the obscurest parish in western 
Pennsylvania, to pass from there to Troy, to 
Boston, and after a few years more to New York, 
where he is now favorably known of all men as 
the Bishop. My brother, George Augustus 
Strong and I had opposite back rooms in the third 
story, and Brooks, coming late and finding the 
best places taken, was billetted in an attic room 
above us, where he could not stand at his full 
height. It was already as great, perhaps, as 
afterwards, but his frame was spare and did not 
fill out to its full proportions for some years. 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



There were no very recent Harvard men then 
in the seminary and Phillips Brooks came to us 
unheralded. I do not know that there had been 
much to say of him. He had stood well in his 
class but had made no exceptional mark. He 
had taught school for a few months, not alto- 
gether successfully. He made no immediate 
impression on us. He was modest, quiet, re- 
served, with rather more of the Massachusetts 
frostiness, than he exhibited in later years after 
contact with various men. He was in the class of 
which my brother was a member. It was 
through my brother that presently I came to 
know him well. A little later a new hall was 
built, some distance back of the main building ; 
those who chose drew lots for the occupancy of 
one of its dozen rooms. Brooks, Thomas 
Yocum now of Staten Island, my brother and I 
were among the fortunate ones, and were hence- 
forth thrown a good deal together by our mutual 
neighborhood and our slight isolation from the 
other students. 

The seminary life was simple and primitive. 
Many of us sawed our own wood, made our own 
fires and did nearly all our own chores. The 
driver of the mail wagon did our few errands 
and made our few purchases at Alexandria, 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



some four miles distant. Our clothes were not 
always of the latest cut, nor in the freshest con- 
dition. We took our meals, abundant, but not 
luxurious, in a basement, half under ground. 
There were coveted seats by the stove door 
where one could turn round from the table and 
toast bread, giving the breakfast or the tea a 
relish. Adjoining the dining room was Prayer 
Hall, a large uncarpeted room, with a desk and 
long wooden benches for its only furniture. 
The ceiling was low : the walls were white- 
washed : I think no picture of any sort relieved 
their blank surfaces. Here some of the recita- 
tions were said, here we met for prayers and for 
a weekly gathering known as the faculty meet- 
ing, when a professor made a few remarks bear- 
ing on the cultivation of spiritual life, and the 
other professors, there were but three, took up 
their parable in turn and emphasized the lesson. 
The talk was devout, earnest, tending to be 
pietistic, but mainly useful and simple. Another 
evening in the week, a debating society met in 
the same place, when papers were read, topics 
discussed and criticisms offered. Those criti- 
cisms were always frank, not always palatable. 
A student with limited intelligence but a rich 
voice and showy delivery, once became conscious 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



of something lacking, and asked a class-mate to 
tell him frankly, why, with his effective presence 
and striking elocution, he made no more impres- 
sion as a speaker. The reply was overwhelming 
and convincing. "Why, So and So, you don't 
know enough. You don't study enough. You 
are too noisy. Perhaps if you'd take more load 
on your cart, it would not rattle so." 

I do not remember that Brooks took any part 
in our debates, made any cutting comments, or 
displayed any of the extemporaneous power which 
afterwards distinguished him. But from the first 
his writing stamped him as no common man. It 
had the ease and charm of a master. The words 
were choice and simple, the phrases idiomatic, 
the sentences brief and lucid, the cadences musi- 
cal, the thought fresh and ripe, the feeling real. 
Some of us had fancied we knew how to write 
tolerable English, but we learned our error and 
took at once a lower room. We recognized an 
art which had become nature or a nature which 
anticipated the gains of art. We saw that what 
we achieved by care and painstaking, he far sur- 
passed without conscious effort. There may 
have lingered something still of the overluxu- 
riance of spring time, but it was a graceful luxu- 
riance not a wasteful and ridiculous excess. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



Harvard severity of taste had already nipped 
some straggling shoots and repressed some ex- 
uberances. Brooks loved to tell how Prof. Child 
had damped his pristine ardor. He had begun 
a college composition by an elaborate flourish of 
trumpets, and had carefully inserted a purple 
patch of which he was not a little proud. What 
was his consternation when the paper came back, 
to find at the close of his labored introduction the 
pencilled comment, "Begin here." "I might 
have been a tolerable writer," Brooks used to add, 
"if I had not been so cruelly disheartened at the 
outset" 

It was an uninspiring life for the most part 
which we led at the seminary, something very 
unlike the eager throbbing life of our great 
theological schools today. Dr. Sparrow was a 
broad, open-minded man: an essentially great man 
he appeared to some of us, To Brooks I know 
he seemed such. But feeble health and a certain 
sluggish atmosphere around him had tamed his 
energies. Virginia was fifty years behind the 
outside world. "I know it and am glad of it," 
said one of her sons in those days. A few men, 
who were ready for the awakening touch, Dr. 
Sparrow set thinking for themselves, but a good 
many of the students slumbered on in spite of 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



him. Dr. May was a saintly man, whose con- 
science did not extend into the sphere of scholar- 
ship ; it did not invade his province of instructor 
in church history. His sense of fidelity as a teacher 
was not disturbed by his cutting the leaves of a 
new text book in the very presence of the class 
who were reciting from it. It was to be pre- 
sumed that he was too familiar with the theme 
to need special acquaintance with any new 
presentation of it. Dr. Packard, who still survives 
at a great age, was an old-fashioned scholar, who 
knew what had been said upon the knotty points 
of his Greek and his Hebrew, but reserved his 
own opinion, holding it in such delicate equi- 
poise as to avoid biasing the minds of his students 
by any definite hint of it, unless a question in- 
volving orthodoxy came before him, when the 
scales gently descended on the accepted side. 
There were no lectures to supplement the text 
books. The recitations were hardly calculated 
to impart knowledge ; they seemed designed 
rather to betray how little we had acquired. 
There was much fervor and piety among us, less 
enthusiasm for scholarship. Good men were not 
sensitive to failures in the class room. There 
was little serious thinking, little outside reading 
either in theology or literature. The Library was 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



small, merely, I think, a dumping place for 
the collections of departed Virginia ministers. 
Bishop Coxe, who had just returned from a visit 
to Oxford, once came to the seminary. As he 
looked about the library, the custodian, a stu- 
dent of the time, set before him with a triumph- 
ant air a time-worn volume. " That book, sir, 
was printed in the days of Queen Elizabeth ! " 
Fresh from the treasures of the Bodleian, the 
good Bishop held up both hands and said with 
charming courtesy — " Is it possible ? " 

Still, with whatever imperfect apparatus and 
unstimulating atmosphere, those who had a mind 
to work worked on in their own lines with nei- 
ther encouragement nor opposition. There was 
a vast deal of idleness, much frivolous bustle, 
some party strife and windy disputation. But it 
was a free and secluded life, full of precious 
leisure to those who knew how to get the sweets 
of it. Thoughtful men, whose springs were in 
themselves, enjoyed the judicious neglect, found 
time to meditate, to browse on the offshoots of 
their own mind and put out roots after their own 
fashion. Brooks employed his opportunity. 
I do not think that he was then characterized 
by the wonderful industry that utilized, in some 
way, every moment of his later years, but he 



10 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



had already his rare facility, and was a faithful 
student in and out of the required course. He 
had brought from college a sound knowledge of 
Greek and Latin, and used it in a very consider- 
able amount of reading in the Church Fathers, 
of whom by some unexplained accident there 
chanced to be in the library the Abbe Migne's 
edition. He brought away one useful result 
from his reading ; he did not henceforward over- 
rate their importance. He satisfied himself that 
all the best of their matter had been absorbed 
into the common christian consciousness and that 
comparatively little remained to reward the 
modern reader. I think he found most to 
reward him in Augustine. He enjoyed, I remem- 
ber, Boethius de Consolatione. We tried to 
read some classical Latin together, Tacitus very 
probably, but it proved a failure. His outfit 
was much more complete than mine. My mis- 
translations became uncomfortably perceptible, 
and I broke up the sittings somewhat peevishly. 
A coolness lasted a day or two : I fancy I saw 
the absurdity of it, I am confident that he did, 
and so passed away the only suspicion of a 
cloud that ever rested on our intercourse. 

I do not think that Brooks in any way took 
our hearts by storm or extorted an immediate 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



admiration except for his ability as a writer. 
He was liked as others were. There was no 
special brilliancy in his talk, there was no visi- 
ble superiority in his character to that of others 
about him. His piety was real but not demon- 
strative. When he offered prayer at any of our 
meetings you could not but feel that God was 
very near and living to him. In his most seri- 
ous moments there was no appalling gravity 
about him. He was not perpetually prying into 
his own soul nor ours. He was alive and grow- 
ing and took it for granted his fellows were, 
without stopping to pull up their roots or his 
own to see. He was very human then and 
always. I do not remember that he told good 
stories in those days. Certainly he enjoyed 
them. A quiet humor bubbled up through all 
his talk. Some of our happiest moments were 
after the mid-day meal, when he would often 
stray into another student's room for a cup of 
digestive coffee. His notion of that beverage 
implied a cup filled with lumps of sugar to the 
brim, the strong decoction being poured into the 
unoccupied cracks or spaces. Or it might be tea 
made in a large mug covered with a red, tomato- 
shaped pin-cushion. It is still affirmed by sur- 
vivors of that potent brew that tea cannot be 



12 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



made without a pin-cushion on top to flavor it. 
As it was immediately after a meal, we were 
naturally hungry, and Maryland biscuit, a much 
kneaded or beaten bread, was in demand. As 
we were all poor and living on very modest 
allowances, such debauches were not things of 
every day. There were those who insisted that 
Brooks, with his reckless consumption of sugar, 
permanently impoverished us. 

That such trifles come to the front in my 
memory shows how eventless were our days. 
It was understood that we were always welcome 
to tea at the houses of the professors. Once or 
twice a year perhaps, we used our privilege. 
It was our chief dissipation. As the chairs 
were pushed back from the tea-table, we sat 
in our places, family prayers followed and dis- 
creet guests did not linger too long after the 
benediction. The roads were dark, the mud 
deep, the dogs loud mouthed, the neighbours 
were scattered and we saw little of them. It 
was pure cloistral life for the most part. In one 
of Brooks's letters in the year that he outstayed me 
at the seminary, he writes of "another winter's 
mental and moral bleakness on that poor hill," 
and in another occurs a revealing sentence 
" When are you coming to see us ? Leave your 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



13 



intellect behind ; you won't need it here." 

The churchmanship of the time and place was 
not advanced. It was a bold step when some 
of us ventured to secure the election of Dr. 
Coxe as preacher before the students on some 
annual occasion. It was doubted if the pro- 
fessors would confirm the choice, and it was un- 
doubted that they looked a little askance upon 
the promoters of it. The ritual was simple to 
barrenness. The music was a repeated martyr- 
dom of St. Cecilia. A sometime chorister may 
be permitted to say so. It was not uncommon 
for the professors to appear in the chancel in 
their overcoats and lay down gloves and muffler 
in the font or on the communion table. The 
architect of a new chapel of a nondescript 
form of Gothic had ventured to relieve the dead 
level of the pews by a modest trefoil or poppy- 
head rising at the end of each, a little above 
the rest. A lively imagination might see a fol- 
iated cross in them. Bishop Mead had such 
an imagination. Bishop Johns had winked at 
them, but the elder Bishop would not trifle 
with his convictions. He arrived to dedicate 
the building. He inspected it the night before. 
A carpenter was summoned and every poppy- 
head was laid low before the opening service. 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



The erring excrescences were treasured in 
memoriam in the rooms of wailing students. 
Yet the number of extreme ritualists proceed- 
ing from the Virginia Seminary, strange to say, 
is small. 

I am trying to give the atmosphere, the local 
color of the life in which Phillips Brooks, with 
some slight impatiences yet with substantial 
happiness, passed nearly three years. It grieves 
me that of our close companionship through two of 
those years so few direct details come back to 
me. I recall occasional walks with him, his 
laugh at my exhilaration in one brisk winter 
tramp when the keen air went to my head like 
wine, and he was glad he had been with me all 
the morning and was therefore sure I was not 
tipsy. He cared very little for exercise at any 
time and being in rugged health felt no need of 
it. Some of us made a business of a game of 
ball daily, to which the seminary bell rang out a 
summons, but I do not think he joined us. In 
the summers among the mountains he would do 
a little tramping, but he never scorned a saddle 
nor a seat in a wagon if it came in his way. 
This, I rather fancy, was a little later, after we 
were at work in our first parishes — his the 
Church of the Advent, Philadelphia, mine in 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



15 



Great Barrington, Massachusetts. There he 
made me annual visits, always preaching for me. 
My regular criticism — one must pick a flaw- 
somewhere — was " Brooks, you preach too fast," 
to which the prompt answer was " Richards, you 
preach too slow." He may have accelerated my 
pace, English and American stenographers will 
unite in doubting if I retarded his. Those earliest 
sermons well countenanced my prophecy, more 
than a year before his ordination, that within 
ten years he would occupy as important a pul- 
pit as any in the land. There also I was " too 
slow." He was recognized sooner than I had 
dared to hope, being within three years invited 
to succeed Dr. Alexander Vinton at the church 
of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia. 

At the first of his ministry in Philadelphia the 
fame of Henry Wise, with his cadaverous look, 
his burning eyes, his southern intensity of man- 
ner, his rare facility of speech, quite over- 
shadowed any later comer in the field. Brooks 
told me once that, exchanging with Wise, he 
found himself among the congregation after the 
service was over and heard a neighbour say : 
" You would'nt have caught me here tonight if 
I had not thought to hear Wise." Brooks, 
not at all the traditional sort of eloquent divine, 



16 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



at first failed of recognition. Gradually people 
came to see that this tall young fellow, whom 
the great Dr. Vinton so often asked to preach 
for him, was head and shoulders above his breth- 
ren in something more than stature, that he had 
a message for ears that knew how to hear, 
and that he had no occasion to shelter himself 
behind Ward Beecher's maxim that " Every- 
thing must be young before it is old and there- 
fore Providence permits young ministers." I can 
hear now Dr. Vinton's deep voice with a tone of 
surprise in it after one of those sermons in the 
dusk of a winter afternoon in that great church 
as he said with conviction, " Why, he's an 
orator." It gave Brooks, in his modest way, 
keen pleasure to be invited to succeed Dr. 
Vinton, the pastor of his boyhood in St. Paul's, 
Boston, an unmistakable king of men, who 
loomed up in the eyes of one trained under his 
preaching into even more than his actual pro- 
portions. When the flattering call came it was 
declined. Presently with urgency it was repeat- 
ed. Mr. Brooks the elder hastened to the scene 
with natural parental alarm at his son's being 
thrust into a place of such responsibility. Aware 
of my familiar acquaintance with Phillips, he 
asked me what I thought of it. I told him I 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



17 



had no question of Brooks' abundant ability for 
that or any other pulpit, but I was anxious lest 
the quantity of work in so large a field might 
overtax him. With a look of relief he replied, 
" If you will answer for his brains I will answer 
for all the rest of him. He never found anything 
hard in his life." I sometimes suspect that he 
never did to the very last of it. There was never 
any apparent effort, no matter what load was laid 
upon him. He worked not merely with a will, 
but without friction. He was at my house once 
on Thursday in Holy Week, a little fagged with 
the Lenten labors. He was to preach on Good 
Friday morning, make an address to his people 
in the afternoon, talk to the soldiers at a hospital 
Saturday noon, and have a preparatory lecture 
Saturday evening, preach on Easter Day morning 
and night, and have a talk to his Sunday School 
between times. And nothing of it all was ready. 
The days of "hustlers " in the ministry were not 
yet, and to my inexperienced vision the prospect 
was appalling. But he was as serene as mid- 
summer. The half-dozen sermons and addresses 
fell into line as the season came for each, and 
each did its work efficiently. I took pains to in- 
quire of those who heard him. And this was in 
his early ministry. 



i8 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



Mainly through his influence upon the parish 
that gave the call, and his affectionate urgency 
upon the rector who accepted it, I went to Phila- 
delphia in the fall of 1861, and for the four years 
of the war we were much together. Two or three 
times a week we met at the rectory of the Rev. 
Charles D. Cooper, with whom Brooks shared a 
house a few years afterwards. It was a hospit- 
able home, with its delightful hostess, who had a 
rare gift of companionable silence, broken now 
and then by witty speech, and much merry and 
some serious talk went on there. From Cooper's 
study proceeded one movement that the chroni- 
cler of those crowded years should not quite lose 
from view. The enemy was at the gate. Lee's 
army had invaded Pennsylvania, was before Har- 
risburgh, was threatening Philadelphia. The 
Quaker City was carrying non-resistance to its 
last consequence, was folding its hands and shak- 
ing in its shoes, and waiting for Providence or 
the general Government to come to its rescue. 
It was a panic of stupor, akin to a dumb ague. 
Brooks, Cooper, and the rest of us, assembled on 
a Monday morning in Cooper's study, waxed 
hot at the local inaction. If laymen would do 
nothing, it was time for the clergy to move. We 
did move on the moment. We drew up a paper, 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



19 



offering our services for the public defence. We 
would not take up arms, but we could shoulder 
shovels and dig trenches. Several clerical meet- 
ings were in session that noon, and we sent dele- 
gations to rouse them. With Brooks and the 
venerable Albert Barnes at the head of the pro- 
cession, wc stormed the Mayor's office, a hundred 
or more strong, and asked to be set at work on 
the defences of the city. We retired, bought our 
spades and haversacks, and waited for orders. 
The example served its purpose. The sting 
stung. The city bestirred itself, and the peril 
passed without our being called into service. 
But Brooks and Albert Barnes were ready and, 
I trust, some of the rest of us. 

Through those tremendous years Brooks was 
foremost in all patriotic work. The time tried 
men as in the fires, of what stuff they were ; his 
stood the proof. The time demanded heroes 
even in civil life. It needed manhood in those 
days to withstand the pressure of those who 
would fain have ignoble peace. Philadelphia 
was close to the border, and southern sympathiz- 
ers — there was a pithier word in common use — 
abounded. Faction ran high. Brooks did not 
defy it. He quietly disregarded it, went his way 
in spite of it, took his heroism naturally, not 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



tragically, as if men were always true and brave. 
In the pulpit, on the platform, he was earnestly 
and eloquently on the side of the nation, ap- 
pealing to what was noblest and loftiest in 
her sons. He was ever ready to speak, to work, 
to set others working. He encountered bliz- 
zards of prejudice and virulence. Vestrymen 
protested, judges who were parishioners ceased 
to be judicial, rich pewholders clamored, pot- 
house politicians raged, fine ladies carped and 
sneered, pleaded and cajoled. None of these 
things moved him. He went his way, spoke his 
word, did his deed, and bore himself like a sim- 
ple king. Those who recall his magnificent 
silence during the period between his election 
and his confirmation as bishop know something 
of his mood. Presently both the educated and 
illiterate rabble discovered that they were dealing 
with that unusual thing, a man ; less uncommon 
at that crisis than at some other periods, but none 
too common in the ministry certainly, then ; one 
whom they could not anger into indiscretion, nor 
threaten into subservience, nor tempt to unworthy 
surrender; a man of the fibre of an old-time 
prophet, with a message to be uttered whether the 
people heeded or refused it ; whether they brought 
wreaths to crown, or stones to stone him ; whether 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



they would build him a pedestal, or dig him a 
grave. I despair of making the young men of 
to-day understand what it cost in those days to be 
lord of one's own soul. Through that weary time 
what an overflowing reservoir of moral force, of 
hope, of courage, of high resolve Brooks was to 
all of us. Then, as ever, his presence was an 
inspiration. There were dark days, days when as 
we met on a street corner, after some bloody 
reverse of our armies, he could only wring my 
hand and say, "Isn't it horrible," and pass on 
glooming ; days when it was easy to take counsel 
of one's meaner fears and cry for peace at any 
price, and try to patch up any miserable cabin of 
refuge from the storm which beat upon our hearts. 
But his heart never flinched nor quailed. His 
light ever shone out clear. Not for an instant did 
his voice falter or grow querulous. He felt to the 
full, what the old carpenter said to Mr. Lincoln 
in one such troubled hour : " I tell you, sir, the 
Lord God Almighty is bossing this job." 

As I said, political feeling ran high in those 
days, and men found themselves in strange places 
with unfamiliar companions. Cooper, Brooks and 
two or three other clergymen found themselves 
one night, when the returns from an important 
election were coming in, in the upper story of the 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



Republican headquarters, where the local mag- 
nates of the party were assembled. As the news 
came over the wires from this county or that, it 
would be shouted from the windows, or shown on 
a " transparency," for the benefit of the waiting 
crowd below. The intervals would be filled with 
cheers for Grant, or Sherman, or Lincoln, for the 
county which had given the last handsome 
majority, or the loyal league which had ensured 
it. The returns lingered on the board, and the 
time dragged heavily. Finally, Cooper thrust his 
head out of window, and cried, " Three cheers for 
the E. K. S." The throng responded with a will, 
and never suspected that the shouts from the third 
story were mingled with shrieks of laughter as that 
very Low Church society received this popular 
sanction. Some of us may have felt a little 
awkward, elbowing the ward politicians, but not 
Brooks. They, too, were human, and he was at 
home among them, accordingly. 

His position as a public leader was so well 
recognized that, when the news came of the cap- 
ture of Richmond, and a thanksgiving service in 
front of Independence Hall was hastily extempo- 
rized, it was he, naturally, who offered prayer on 
the occasion. As he gazed heavenward, pouring 
from quivering lips torrents of praise and suppli- 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



23 



cation, a rough fellow in the crowd who did not 
know him, said to his neighbor who did, "Look at 
that old fogy yonder, praying with his eyes turned 
up, as if God was any more up than down." "Who 
are you calling an old fogy? Take that," was 
the wrathful rejoinder. And a knock-down blow 
explained " that " sufficiently. As Brooks had on 
his lips at the moment a petition for the overthrow 
and discomfiture of our enemies, it was held to 
be the most immediate answer to prayer on record. 
Brooks was still, for the most part, only a local 
celebrity. Brigadiers were more apt to come to 
the front in those days than pulpit orators, and 
the great Beecher occupied the field. But in 
some way Harvard College had kept track of her 
tail son, and he was invited to offer the Prayer at 
the Commemoration Service for those of her 
children who had died in the war, a brother of 
his being among them. Col. Higginson, who 
was present, told me that when he saw the name 
of a Mr. Brooks on the programme, he wondered 
why a young man of whom he had never heard 
should be so chosen. He put himself in the 
mood of endurance through what he regarded a 
dull formality. But with the first sentence from 
those burning lips his attitude changed. He 
found himself listening breathless. He felt that 



24 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



he had never heard living prayer before; that 
here was a man talking straight into the face — 
into the very heart of God. When the " Amen " 
came, it seemed to him that the occasion was 
over, that the harmonies of the music had been 
anticipated, that the poem had been read, and the 
oration already uttered, and that after such a prayer 
every other exercise might well be dispensed with. 
Perhaps before Lowell's Commemoration Ode 
was ended, his impression may have been modi- 
fied, but he did not say so, and President Eliot, 
in a paper published since these words were 
written, implies that even that mighty ode was 
overshadowed for the season. The ode remains, 
but the prayer is unrecorded, save in heaven. 

After my going to Ohio in the summer of 1865 
it was in our vacations that I saw most of Brooks. 
He visited me twice, I think, in Columbus, once 
with Henry Potter ; and we met in the mountains 
in August. With Cooper and my brother, at dif- 
ferent times, we did most of what was worth 
doing there. Brooks was never an athlete, and 
was already somewhat overweighted for climbing ; 
but he was good for twenty miles a day along the 
road, and could scale a mountain with the rest of 
us. He liked frequent rests by the way, to light 
a pipe and view the landscape. I, who did not 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



25 



smoke, complained that when in motion we walked 
but three miles an hour, and stopped once every 
hour and were half an hour stopping, which 
lowered the pace discreditably; whereat I would 
be silenced with the charge of using up a friend 
each season, and having to provide myself with 
a new one. On one such tramp Frederick Brooks 
was of the party, but found the pace too much 
for him, and dropped out at the end of the first 
day's march, as he dropped out of life so suddenly 
and sadly a few years later. Once, after a long, 
hot morning's walk, we stopped at noon near the 
head of the Pemigewasset for a dip in the stream. 
The current was not yet warmed through, after 
leaving the ice that lingered about the roots of 
Lincoln and Lafayette. We were some distance 
apart, and entered the river at the same moment. 
The plunge was brief but decisive. It lasted while 
you could count one. " How do you find it, P. B " ? 
I shouted. "Just one word for it," he shouted 
back, "Baptismal Regeneration." 

His endurance on one occasion was more . 
severely tested. Starr King's exuberant volume, 
his rhapsody on the White Hills, had just been 
issued, and inspired us to do what then was rarely 
done, what was known as "going over the Peaks," 
though strictly it was going over the Northern 



26 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



Peaks, from Madison to Washington. There 
were no defined paths, no "painted trails," and 
guides were few. We secured a man, a farmer in 
the summer and hunter in the winter, from the 
neighborhood of the Glen House, who was said 
to know the way. At half-past six one fine July 
morning, we started from the hotel, went a couple 
of miles or so on the road towards Gorham, then 
struck across the valley and up the mountain side. 
It was very steep, with much fallen timber flung 
helter-skelter, in the fashion known to mountain- 
eers as "Jack Straws." Lifting ourselves over a 
huge log, we would sink to our middle in deep 
beds of moss. The sun was fierce, the air close, 
the black flies vigilant. It was discouraging for 
fair pedestrians to be told on reaching timber-line, 
after six hours severe labor, that we had walked 
from the road perhaps a mile and a half. 

For the first part of the day Brooks took his 
share of the work as well as any of us. We had 
reached open rock and fresher air. It was blow- 
ing half a hurricane ; we had meant to make two 
days leisurely work of the trip, camping at the 
base of Jefferson. But our guide insisted that 
the wind was too high and the temperature too low 
to make camping safe for heated and tired men. 
We must push forward. It was sunset as we stood 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



27 



on the, peak of Jefferson and saw the Carter 
Mountains rimmed with prismatic colors across 
the Great Gulf. There were still two or three 
hours of good work before us. Somewhere here, 
Brooks, who in those days needed double rations, 
and had only been provided on the scale of 
smaller men, began to flag. He could go no 
farther. He implored us not to wait for him, but 
to leave him anywhere under the shelter of a rock 
with a shawl, for the night. It is needless to say 
that nobody would hear of this. Spurred by our 
entreaties, he would struggle on for a few minutes 
and then fling himself exhausted down for a long 
rest. Night came on ; we lost our way. The guide 
and the compass expressed different opinions. 
At last we guessed what was the trouble with 
Brooks ; some of us, fortunately, had an egg or two 
in reserve ; by careful feeding and patient resting^ 
he presently gained a little strength; the moon 
rose, the wind was in our favor, getting under our 
packs and boosting us up the last stiff climb, and 
at a little after midnight we reached the Tip-top 
house. We threw ourselves on the office floor, for 
every bed was taken, and found oil-cloth as slum- 
berous as feathers. Afterwards, with my brother in 
the Alps, Brooks showed much endurance, going 
everywhere afoot and tiring lighter men. For a 



28 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



good many years past he has abandoned such work 
to others, "never walking where he could ride," 
he said. The last walk I had with him was year 
before last, for an hour along the road, at North 
Andover. 

It was in the summer of 1865 that Brooks 
made the first of those many excursions to Europe 
and elsewhere, which have been so delightful and 
refreshing to him. The strain of the parish 
through the war had tired him, and he was glad of 
a long rest. He wrote me several long and charm- 
ng letters from London, from Tyre, from the 
steamer between Jaffa and Naples. In one which 
I cannot lay my hands on, I recall a characteristic 
sentence, "O Charles, you should be over here, if 
only to know what a little thing the Protestant Epis- 
copal church looks, seen from this distance." It 
was not the Church Catholic he was thus belittling, 
but our special ecclesiastical version, viewed apart 
from the great whole. It looked small in view of 
a recognition of broad Christendom. It has looked 
smaller and smaller to him in its denominational and 
sectarian aspect ever since. And broad Christen- 
dom, noting the largeness of his range, owns him 
as her minister, "our Bishop" in his grave to-day. 

How pleasant his letters were, always. Here are a 
few extracts from those of the last two or three years. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



29 



" Such a delightful warm Sunday, and nothing in 
the world to do. I have ignominiously run away 
from work, leaving it to my pampered assistants, 
and last Sunday and to-day I have been idling 
here with such delight in it that I should like to 
idle always." 

"I can't get over the feeling that all life, thus 
far, is a sort of trial-trip, and that the real, serious 
voyage for which the ship was built is yet to come. 
I find myself expecting to be twenty-five and thirty- 
five, and forty- five again. I can't believe that we 
have really passed those interesting stations with 
so little sensation, and are not to see them any 
more. I do not know how it is all coming about, 
and I can't say that I exactly believe in it, but it 
seems to me as if it were so." 

Again, in July, 1891 : "Yes, the Bishops have con- 
sented, and I am to be consecrated on Wednesday, 
the 14th of October, in Trinity Church, Boston. 
You will come, won't you ? You have seen me 
through so much of life that I am sure you will 
not refuse me this, and I promise not to be made 
anything else as long as I live." 

" When I think how much of other people's 
thoughts I have dared to occupy for the last three 
months, I am truly ashamed of myself ; but it has 
not been my fault. And now it is over, and I 



30 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



shall go into the upper house and be forgotten." 
Little he knew how precious his memory was to be, 
and to how many ! 

" I have been visiting Arthur, next week I go for 
a few days to John. I feel like Jephthah's 
daughter on her round of farewell visits, and as if 
I were never going to see anybody any more. On 

my way to Arthur I stopped and saw Bishop , 

who was kind, and talked as if he had always 
known that I could say the Apostles and Nicene 
Creeds, and had wanted me in the House of 
Bishops from the start." 

And then the last lines of Dec. 29th, 1892 : "I 
spent the Feast of the Nativity with Arthur. One 
of the strange things about the new place, is that 
one is freest on the days which used to be the least 
free. Nobody wants a Bishop on Christmas or 
Good Friday. So Arthur took me in, and I 
preached for him morning and afternoon. William 
and his family went on also, and we had a big 
family dinner on Monday evening, and played 
childish games till midnight, and it was all very 
simple, and silly, and delightful. I did not stay for 
the Cathedral Corner Stone. I like to do my 
pageants in Chicopee and Vandeusenville, New 
York is far too big and bumptious ; Potter may 
have that to himself." It seems to me that when 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



3i 



Brooks's letters are collected they will make a vol- 
ume that for ease and charm the world will place 
with Cowper's, or Lamb's, or Thackeray's. Brooks 
always reminded me of Thackeray in figure, car- 
riage and character. The surface of their lives 
was very different, but the two great preachers 
had much in common at the core. The large, lov- 
ing heart was the biggest fact in both of them. 

I do not remember that the aesthetic side of 
Brooks's mind had been much developed before 
that first long absence abroad. His taste in liter- 
ature was always just. He was a lover of verse, 
knew his Tennyson and his Browning and his 
Lowell well. The last book I talked of with him 
was Watson's Lachrymae Musarum, which he 
praised warmly, ranking the Tennyson ode almost 
with Lycidas. Music, except in its simplest re- 
ligious form, was a sealed book to him, though to 
please my children once he displayed what he 
called his one accomplishment, and picked out 
Fair Harvard with one finger on the piano. He 
had learned it from a pretty girl on Class Day, and 
retained it as he retained most things he had ever 
cared to know. But I think the masters in music 
had nothing to say to him, and if musical Boston 
has ever beheld him inside a concert-room, I 
fancy it was to please some one who loved music 



32 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



better than he. But art, in painting and sculpture, 
delighted him. His taste was admirable, and he 
would go to pains and cost to gratify it ; in the 
hurry of the last days of the last general Conven- 
tion he snatched an hour to look at a collection 
of supposed old masters, and enjoyed thoroughly 
one or two, a Palma Giovane especially. We 
know what a museum that study of his, where we 
shall not meet again, became. When he was to 
build his great church, he found in Richardson a 
fitting architect for that masterly building, the 
most important building in the history of art in 
this country, and, so far as I know, anywhere in 
the present century. I cannot but trust that in 
Augustus St. Gaudens, whose work he so much 
valued, he will yet find the fitting sculptor to 
hand him down to the ages in monumental bronze. 
What a delightful host Brooks was ! How happy 
he seemed in tendering his gracious hospitality. 
What a fine art he had in making you feel that you 
conferred upon him a favor in becoming his guest. 
" You will come to the club next week, and make 
me happy," he would write ; or, " You will come 
next Monday? The question is not whether you 
want to come, it is whether I want to have you — 
which I do." Such were his winning phrases. 
In one of his letters of very long ago, he described 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



33 



Browning's talk as not preeminently clever, but 
easy and delightful, "cordial and hearty as a dear 
old uncle." "I went home and slept after hear- 
ing him, as one does after a fresh starlight walk 
with a cool breeze in his face." It was his own 
ideal one may think. To how many of us has he 
talked like a loving cousin, or tender brother, or 
dear old uncle, while we saw the " fresh starlight" 
and breathed the bracing air. Rarely did he take 
any special lead in the talk, or absorb any large 
amount of it. I think his contribution to the 
conversations here was often less than that of 
most of us. At our last meeting, where no one 
seemed very eager to claim the floor, he talked 
right on, longer than I remember to have heard 
him on any previous occasion. His, when it came, 
was more simple, earnest and sincere than most 
talk, not an effort to shine and be clever and 
toss epigrams about, but a direct word from the 
heart and to it. Never, but once, did I see him in 
the least play the lion. It was during the conven- 
tion in New York, in '89. It was at a house where 
I was at home, and there was but one other guest. 
His hostess now and again tossed a thread of talk 
in his way, but he gracefully put it aside. Pres- 
ently, once more she adroitly cast her line ; at last 
I could see an expression half of amusement and 



34 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



half of annoyance cross his face, as much as to say 
"If you insist upon my roaring, roar I will," and 
he told of his recent journeyings in Japan, and 
discussed the people and their art in a delightful 
way. He could if he would, and for once he con- 
sented to. 

What a host he was to us, the members of this 
club from which he is taken. It clustered about 
him in the beginning, and he remained its loved 
and honored centre to the end. To most of us, 
however loyal to one another, its meetings have 
meant primarily an evening with Brooks. The 
first meeting, in the fall of 1870, was held at his 
rooms in the Hotel Kempton, not more than 
half a dozen of us being present. We were rather 
dull, perhaps, at that first meeting. Brooks often 
has reminded me how I lingered behind at the 
close and said, "I wonder if this club will ever 
get together again." As usual, he was hopeful, 
and his hope prevailed. The club gained 
strength as it went on. From the first, Henry 
Allen supplied a vigorous element of otherwise- 
mindedness. I shall never forget the splendid 
good nature with which, on one occasion, another 
Arnold of Winkelried, he played target to the 
general quiver, going home fairly larded with mul- 
titudinous shafts, but with as bright a countenance 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



35 



as if our words had been oil instead of very swords. 
He struck the key notes of the club then, if they 
had not been struck before, the notes of perfect 
freedom and perfect tolerance. We have always 
said what we would, and borne the consequences 
without malice, and judged each other generously. 
We had no laws, and no officers but the secre- 
tary, who became the sole fountain of law. When 
we needed authority we appealed to him. "New- 
ton, what is the law of this club here " ? Forth- 
with he mounted the tripod and extemporized an 
oracle. It was understood that this club was 
limited to twenty. The agreement was useful as 
a point of departure. We never exceeded that 
number until we wanted more, when, a few 
founders protesting, more came in and the club 
became twenty-five. That bound is final ; no one 
would dream of passing it ; so our present number 
of members is thirty-three. Our course has been 
absolutely consistent. We have had no law, and 
have disregarded any precedents that were likely 
to acquire the force of law. Brooks always acted 
as president, though no such office was known to 
exist among us. Newton is supposed to have 
evolved an ordinance to that effect, and there were 
no dissenting voices. Time has a little impaired 
our original structure. We have a president and 



36 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



secretary now, and where the law-making power 
resides, only constitutional adepts can determine. 

We have lost valued members by removal. 
Mackay-Smith, Huntington, Tiffany and Greer 
have gone to New York, and Courtney to Nova 
Scotia. Newton has moved out of range, but now 
and then beams on us. Father Hall rejoiced in 
our light for a season, but grew too luminous and 
was withdrawn. Whether in his cell, on bread 
and water, he is expiating the crime of reading 
aloud in the refectory of his order a sermon of 
the Bishop of Massachusetts is unknown. Cer- 
tainly no penalty could exceed the provocation. 

The club has been held, outside, to be a dan- 
gerous power, constructed for the active propa- 
gation of heresy and the control of the politics of 
the Diocese. We, within it, know how far this is 
from the truth. Many of us are broad church- 
men, some are low churchmen, some extremely 
high churchmen. We are not here because of 
our opinions, or in spite of them, but irrespective 
of them. A main reason for the election of 
Father Hall to our membership was that he 
seemed at the farthest possible ecclesiastical re- 
move from the most of us. That he would be 
leavened by the contact hardly occurred to us as 
a possibility. Some of us voted for the election 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



37 



of Bishop Brooks, others did not so vote. No 
one saw any difference in their attitude to Brooks 
or his to them, or the club's to them afterwards. 
After that election it seemed best to him to dis- 
arm prejudice by resigning his presidency in this 
club and accepting membership in other like 
societies. He was glad to be with them, but we 
cannot fail to remember, also, how his heart lost 
no interest in this club, how often he met with us, 
how cordial he was with us. For many years 
our meetings were in his study. He would have 
it so, and it was pleasant to be his debtor for 
hospitality so gladly offered. He said, the last 
time I saw him, that if he had known how often 
he could arrange to be at home on club nights, 
he should have urged us to retain our old meeting 
place. Our "loving cup" given him on his 
election to the Bishopric was a source of pride 
and pleasure to him, of greater pride and pleasure 
to us who gave it, in slight token of our love 
and gratitude. He took it as he took any such 
tribute, not at all as his due, but as if his friends 
were so good and kind to him. 

I have always stood too near our dear friend 
to be the best judge of his powers. All he did 
and was is delightful to me, and I hardly know 
how to analyze my impressions. By and by, 



38 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



perhaps, he will recede into the proper distance 
to view him justly, but it is hard work to weigh 
and estimate him now. I shall utter no affec- 
tionate insincerities. I may even seem to you to be 
too severely impartial. I think he would forgive 
me anything rather than indiscriminating eulogy. 
He would desire truth, above all things. 

Brooks was not a profound scholar. He was 
well grounded in his classics and full of the 
spirit of the ancient masters in literature, but I 
think rarely reverted to the Greek and Latin 
writers. He read French with delight. Its 
lucidity was congenial to him. He read German 
with some facility. He was a wide reader, but 
by no means an omnivorous reader in his own 
tongue. I do not think he was familiar with the 
earlier English writers, or with the modern Ger- 
man scholars, as Washburn, for example, was. 
Of late years he had small time for reading, 
yet he was always well abreast of current thought, 
and knew whatever was most worth while in liter- 
ature. He was not a constructive theologian. 
Religious thought did not assume a dogmatic 
shape with him. I do not know that he can be 
called a great or original thinker. I say this hes- 
itatingly, for I am aware others differ from me. 
Yet it might be difficult to point out in his published 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



39 



volumes, any leading thought which could not 
be traced to older sources in Arnold and Whately, 
in Robertson, Maurice and Stanley, in McLeod 
Campbell and Horace Bushnell. He was not a 
great organizer of institutions. They sprang up 
under his impulse, but others shaped them. He 
rather undervalued the administrative men, thought 
they made too much of their convenient and ser- 
viceable gift, and were ranked higher in the com- 
mon esteem than the occasion called for. He 
was not a fiery champion of causes or leader 
of multitudes, like Wesley or Luther. His words 
were not half battles, like Luther's. They were 
victorious marches across the field. They were 
serene influences, filling the air like sunshine. 
Men breathed them as health into their lungs. 
Personally he was a great character. Intellect- 
ually we might call him a genius of the highest 
order in the application of the good news of Christ 
to everyday, modern life. His distinction and 
originality were there. 

The rarity of his nature was in its symmetry, its 
evenness, its roundness of development. He was 
not like Stanley or Maurice, almost a disembodied 
spirit, with the soul gleaming through a thin vesture 
of decay. The great body was a fit tabernacle for 
the large mind. It suggested, even in his life- 



40 


IMPRESSIONS OF 




time, the monumental bronze which will perpet- 
uate not his memory, but his grand presence to 
future ages. The healthy frame gave freedom 
and ease of play to all his faculties. His mind 
was capacious on every side. His memory was 
retentive, but not parsimonious. It did not re- 
tain chaff and wheat, dross and gold, dingy rags 
and priceless jewels equally. It kept a rich store 
of principles unencumbered with their multitu- 
dinous facts and details. His judgment was nearly 
always sound and sober. Yet the judicial ele- 
ment did not so far preponderate as to paralyze 
action. His reason was clear and penetrative, 
not indifferent and cold. His logical understand- 
ing was well knit, yet not predominating. He 
analyzed a thought as microscopically as a botan- 
ist analyzes a flower, yet the work once done, the 
petals resumed their places, the flower was re- 
created with its bloom unimpaired, its fragrance 
undispersed, and came to its full fruitage uninter- 
rupted. His imagination was strong and lively, 
yet was restrained. It never stepped beyond its 
province. He could have been a poet had he 
not been called to be a prophet. His sword, 
if I may use one of his own striking texts, his 
sword was bathed in heaven. Yet while the 
blade flamed and flashed and circled in irides- 






PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



41 



cent beauty, it never for an instant forgot its 
work. It was always a manly weapon, smiting 
home. His humor was abundant, while ever sub- 
dued to the seriousness of his vocation. It 
bubbled over in friendly talk, but never in- 
vaded his public utterances, except in the Lec- 
tures upon Preaching, which are full of it. In 
the pulpit he was too much in earnest for any 
such caprice of thought. The Puritan intensity 
of his race quite brushed it aside. His will 
was vigorous and manly ; resolute without obstin- 
acy. He was too sure of its temper and resil- 
ience perpetually to assert it. It was there, if 
need be, firm as steel. Meanwhile he was open 
to argument and persuasion, and could change 
his mind for cause, though perhaps as Scotch- 
men joke, " with difficulty." His affections were 
fervent, yet well in hand. Few men loved more 
or better, but his love was rarely blind. His 
passions only supplied fuel to his will and reason. 
They did not affect his purpose, they only inten- 
sified his force. Without deflecting the arrow, 
they gave tenseness to the cord and spring to the 
bow. 

Brooks was a man of real and profound faith. 
It was not such faith as some have had, to whom 
life was so filled with God as to crowd man and 



42 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



nature out of the world, where no place was left 
for them. The God whom Brooks reverently 
recognized was One in whom men live and move 
and have their being, a God whose presence not 
takes, but makes room in his universe, an imma- 
nent God, " Not far but near, about us, nay, within," 
an encompassing atmosphere, the breath of life to 
all things. He could not define him, he felt and 
rejoiced in him. He conceived him as a Father, 
and understood that that involved the existence of 
sons to share his nature and his heart. He be- 
lieved in man as a measureless possibility, a vast, 
open capacity which God alone could fill. He 
believed in God as Infinite Love and Longing to 
realize that ideal possibility, to fill that measure- 
less capacity up to the very brim. He believed 
in Christ as the One Being in whom that Eternal 
Purpose had been unobstructed, that divine long- 
ing fully met ; the ideal of our humanity with its 
roots in our common, earthly soil, and its bloom 
in the upper light, with its reproductive fruit- 
age in a nobler race of men. He saw God 
shining from the face of Jesus Christ, and in his 
radiance found the light of life for all men. He 
saw our years on earth as years of heavenly edu- 
cation. He no more thought of the divine effort 
and method as limited to Christendom than he 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



43 



thought of all learning and teaching as limited 
to the colleges and schools. He felt that wherever 
there is a soul, there beside and within that soul 
is the presence and power of the Holy Ghost ; 
that the shop instructs as well as the school-room ; 
that common life is divinely full of training ; that 
love is preaching God from the eyes of mothers 
and the lips of babes, as truly as from every page 
of old-time evangelist, or voice of modern prophet. 
He believed that in no land was God without 
witness, and dared fancy that the heathen might 
have messages for us, as we for them ; that Japan 
and China might contribute to the Christianity of 
the Ages as the barbarians, whom earlier centuries 
Christianized, themselves have done. 

Our friend, I need not say it here, was a man 
of large and generous sympathy. He was in 
touch with all wise efforts for the service of his 
kind, ready for any good word or work. His was 
no vague philanthrophy, dealing with men in 
masses, but a hearty desire to console and bless 
and save each individual among them all. It was 
not easy to tire or exhaust his sympathy. Bring 
him in actual contact with one who needed him, 
and that moment virtue went forth from him. He 
was a perennial fountain to whoever held a cup. 
He bore patiently all manner of interruptions, 



44 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



partly because of the perfect discipline of his mind, 
which could work at all disadvantages ; but mainly, 
because he could not risk repelling or postponing 
the appeal to him of any one whom he might 
possibly serve. You did not have to rouse his 
interest ; it was alert before you spoke. Whether 
men were attractive, were amiable or not, mattered 
little. Seen in the distance they might be indif- 
ferent or uninteresting, or repulsive to him ; but 
let them once come into his presence, and the 
electric current was quickly formed, and flowed 
unobstructed. He saw them as sons of his Father, 
brethren of his Lord, brothers of his own family. 
Through whatever deformities and hatefulnesses 
he penetrated to the essential soul, and his love 
kindled and became a working force upon that 
straightway. He had a royal largeness of heart, 
a divine munificence of sympathy. He gave of 
himself, and grew as he gave and found gladness 
in giving. The city which gave him birth, the 
college which trained him, the parishes which 
sustained and rejoiced in him, the diocese which 
honored and mourns him, all alike felt he was their 
glad servant, pouring out his lavish best upon 
them always. 

Others have shared his profound faith and broad, 
inclusive love ) but who has had such buoyancy 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



45 



of hope as he ? such sublime confidence that all 
must come right in God's own world, which Jesus 
was born in and died for, where the Holy Spirit 
was a deathless presence and power? Partly it 
was a native endowment, partly it had been 
developed by the rare happiness of his life ; but 
it was a christian grace also, cultivated through 
seasons of anxiety and of sorrow, ripened by 
experience of what good things God had wrought. 
The young were drawn to him, as to one who, in 
this as in so much else, never ceased to be a boy, 
and the old retricked their beams, and found "glad, 
confident morning " again. It was a hopefulness 
that did not make him rash or presumptuous, but 
only glad and humble, and calmly expectant : sure 
of God's great purpose and tender mercy, sure 
that man was able to hold countless treasures from 
the divine influx ; sure that God was ever reach- 
ing out towards the accomplishment of his ideal 
for humanity once revealed to us in Jesus Christ. 
All things were at work for his good, our good, 
all men's good, and what glories were in reserve 
so soon as we loved the Lord Jesus. It was a 
hope so strong and vital as at times to seem 
unreasoning. Leave God out of the premises, it 
was indeed unreasonable. But holding to Him, 
anchored within the veil, it had a right to be, and 



4 6 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



never fog could damp, nor storm could shake it. 

Bishop Brooks, as I have said, was rarely fortu- 
nate in his life ; in his native gifts, his home in- 
fluences, his early associations, the occasions and 
opportunities that were opened to him. The vicis- 
situdes of the few years of our national struggle 
at the outset of his ministry, developed and edu- 
cated him, the conflict with slavery intensified 
his manhood, the new movement in theology 
made room for him, stimulated his intellect and 
broadened his range. He grew here in New Eng- 
land as a strong tree in congenial soil. The pass- 
ing storms or droughts only sent the roots deeper 
and gave them firmer foothold. Under his 
wide spread boughs how large a flock at last found 
shelter ! 

The great trunk lies low. We must not vainly 
bewail him. Shall we not call him fortunate in 
his death, also? No weariness of protracted ill- 
ness, no slow wasting of disease, no consciousness 
of flagging force, no inroad of encroaching 
years, no chilling of the warm affections, no decay 
of the splendid intellect, his life crowned with the 
highest honors his church and the world of let- 
ters could give, encountering just enough oppo- 
sition to show his hold upon the community, 
and to rally such devoted defenders as few 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



47 



men ever had, long enough in his office to 
demonstrate even to gainsay ers that he was to be 
a bishop of the noblest stamp, his name a house- 
hold word throughout the land and across the 
seas, why should he not rest and be thankful? 
Why should he not be withdrawn from the field 
where victory and peace smiled upon him, and 
God and all men said, " well done" ? What more 
had he to live for here ? Why should the only 
promotion that remained to him be delayed ? 

Men of science tell us of the Conservation of 
Physical Forces, that no least motion ever dies, 
but simply changes form, that the energy of the 
earthquake or of the beneficent sunshine is not 
exhausted or consumed, but is simply transmuted 
and stored in other ways. Must we not be sure of 
the conservation of moral and spiritual forces also ? 
Can we fancy that this tireless energy, this splendid 
intensity, this beneficent sunshine, this buoyant 
and inspiring life are extinguished, that the power 
of that noble character ceased when the last breath 
was drawn and Phillips Brooks went home to his 
Father ? Not so. The world that seems to us poorer 
by his loss, is still rich in those whose spirits are 
touched to nobler issues by this sudden shock of 
sorrow. Men are to-day, all the land over, gird- 
ing themselves to braver effort, that they may do 



4 8 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



their part in the world whence he is taken. When 
the strong arms on which men lean are palsied, 
then they are compelled to learn to stand alone. 
I do not say there are no necessary men, I say 
men are necessary for a season, and then it is ex- 
pedient that they should go away. They go, and 
we are left to do without them, and gf ow strong in 
their absence, because we must grow strong. It 
was true once of the master, surely ever since it 
has been true even of the greatest of his disciples. 

As I look back upon the life that we are parting 
with, I seek to know where lay its distinctive 
power. I find it in Phillips Brooks' masterly ap- 
plication of Christianity to modern life ; his sense 
of the unexhausted efficacy for conscience and 
heart of the Old Gospel of Christ Jesus. I find it 
in his positive and constructive method of present- 
ing truth, trusting it without controversy to do its 
office. I find it in his magnificent hope for man 
and men. I find it in his transparent truthfulness, 
that never feared to confront nor to diffuse the light. 
I find it in his eager, simple, childlike, manlike, 
Christlike love, natural as the sunshine, and de- 
lightful as the day. 

Upon an old friend's grave I lay this loving 
tribute. Would it were more worthy of him and 
of you. 



Recollections 

of 

Phillips Brooks. 

7 

G. A. Strong. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



Recollections of Phillips 
Brooks. 



BY A SEMINARY CLASSMATE. 




Y recollections of Phillips 
Brooks date back to the 
Theological Seminary in 
Alexandria, Virginia, where 
we first met as students 
in the Autumn of 1856, 
nearly thirty-seven years ago. He came later 
than the rest of us, two weeks after term- 
opening, and, as all the good rooms were 
taken, was forced to make the most of poor 
chances and the least of his inches in a cramped 
room in the attic. He received callers in a pos- 
ture one fancied, at first glance, must be peculiar 
to Boston. The absurdity of putting an innocent 
stranger in a cell he couldn't stand up in, worked 
promptly in his favor, and better quarters were 
soon found for him. That attitude, by the way, 



52 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



repeated itself once in my Medford chancel, a 
year or two after we left the Seminary. He had 
broken his eye-glasses on the ride out from Boston, 
and the desk was a foot too far down for him. In 
a surplice of mine that stopped at his knees, and 
with his back at an angle, his figure in profile was 
"a sight to make an old man young"; but it 
mattered nothing to him, if he knew it, or indeed 
to anyone else after he got under way in the 
sermon. Another odd view of him could be had 
in his room any early morning of those three 
years, with his feet out the end of the "regulation" 
iron bedstead, — as much too short as the ceiling 
of his first garret was too low. 

We were classmates, and were together much of 
the time from start to finish. He never took very 
kindly to Hebrew, but as a classical scholar none 
matched him. One man thought otherwise, — but 
he hailed from South Carolina. The Greek of the 
New Testament Epistles as he dealt with it, and of 
Herodotus as I pretended to study it with him, 
"rejoiced like Enoch in being translated." His 
rare gifts as writer, told their story in his earliest 
essays. The style had the grace of the after ser- 
mons, a nameless quality that made some of us 
feel we must retire and begin over again. There 
was much of the same trouble with the thought ; 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



53 



it never seemed like yours, or like what might 
come to be yours in time. The only cheering 
thing about it, was that it surprised the professors. 
There was some dull comfort in hearing Dr. 
Sparrow say, "Mr Brooks is very remarkable": 
and when the time came for writing tentative ser- 
mons, the last year of the three, the sense of not 
being "cutout" ourselves for his kind of work pre- 
cisely, grew almost encouraging. One sometimes 
wonders how those "parsonet" sermons would 
stiike one now. They were a kind of revelation 
to us, then, and our judgments were as crude as 
our styles. We called them thoughtful, earnest, 
strangely suggestive, and as perfect in structure 
as if shaped by an art instinct, obeying a hidden 
law. One thing is sure, even allowing for some 
critical "vealiness," — the illustrations were pictures 
"summed up and closed in little," condensed argu- 
ments often, window-imagery that let in light. 
They illustrated. A simile in one sermon, on a 
text long forgotten, is still in my memory : "as 
the child scoops its hollow in the sand and the 
great sea comes up and fills it for him"; a pic- 
tured hint of how God's grace supplies man's 
needs. The imagery was, as the true poet's is, 
his own ; and he might have been true poet if he 
had not been greater preacher. Three sonnets, 



54 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



read in our Seminary Rhetorical Society, I never 
saw again, though I asked for them more than 
once in after days ; but there are few in our lan- 
guage finer, — than one of them particularly, — 
with such grace of classic form, such majesty of 
movement, such music in them. May they come 
to life again in the biography that somebody, — 
his brother I hope, — will write. 

Another more sacred thought of him goes back 
to the class prayer meeting, held each week in one 
of our rooms. We had never heard such prayers, 
so fervent, trustful, simple, so full of what we 
should not have guessed was in him till he testi- 
fied beside us on the knees. He had learned a 
lesson the books could not teach, worth more to 
him and to those he knelt with, then and after- 
wards, than the cultured scholarship he brought 
from Harvard, or the systematic theology (more 
or less of it), that Alexandria gave us. When he 
stood on the steps of Independence Hall at the 
close of the war, with the bowed multitude before 
him, and again in the great tent in Cambridge on 
Commemoration Day (vivid memories both to 
me), the many realized, as the few in the class 
meetings did, part of the truth of a character 
which has left a deeper impress on minds and 
hearts than any other of our land and time. One 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



55 



likes to think how many his prayers have helped 
in grief, and doubt, and sickness, and dread of 
dying, since student days. That the sense of life's 
seriousness was at the root of the character, none 
who knew him questioned for a moment then or 
since. 

No word ever came from his lips to be blushed 
at. The comment's abrupt transition brings the 
blood to one's face as no utterance of his ever did. 
His head dropped at a broad joke as at a flat ser- 
mon. One doubts whether the author of either 
escaped the condemnation of his inward disgust 
by any after promotion, — to a bishopric, even. 
To forgive was not to forget. But the whimsi- 
cal side of things appealed to him always. Blunder 
and "humour" (in either the crotchety or the 
frolicky sense, Ben Jonson's or Artemus Ward's), 
had for him a perennial freshness, — though he 
rather resented a dig at himself. 

I see him now as he started up one day in his 
room, where some of us sat, to cross the hall to 
a neighbor's, and stood a moment absent-mind- 
edly knocking at his own door inside, till our 
laughing chorus broke the fit of abstraction. His 
face wore the look it wore years later in Boston, 
when, driving three of us out to Mr. Winthrop's 
at Brookline, the horses swung round a corner 



56 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



and frisked up the wrong street in contempt of 
his " whoa " ! His stifled surprise was funnier at 
the time than it seemed afterwards if you dared to 
refer to it. But of other men's absurdities, in act 
or speech, he had all the appreciation you could 
wish, — perhaps more. 

A burst of inconsequential wrath on my part, 
at a black waiter who kept leaving the dining-hall 
door open into the kitchen, — " If you don't shut 
that door, — / will" /he never forgot or let me 
forget. " The most blood-curdling threat on 
record," he called it. 

A "Well! good night"! to a dull brother 
who was too long in getting out of the room after 
beginning to seem to, furnished him a cherished 
formula through life. He kept one busy deny- 
ing things which he labelled as facts of one's 
history. No man had better right to saddle 
stories on others, for no one had more of such 
saddled on him. 

A fresh item about him, going the round of the 
papers two years since, led to his saying in reply 
to a question, that most of these stories were 
fictions. 

" That story," I said, "of you and Dr. McVickar 
and Richardson at the meeting in England, when 
the chairman remarked upon the physical degen- 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



57 



eracy of Americans, rising one after another with 
' Mr. Chairman, I am an American.' " "It never 
happened," he said. " Its sole foundation is in 
an experience of Judge Gray's — but it is pure 
fable so far as we are concerned." "The story 
of you three at a German bath confounding the 
man in charge with successive demands for bath- 
ing suits to fit your abnormalness," — " Not a 
word of truth in it," he broke in, — "it never 
happened or anything like it." Several more of 
the stories got the same snubbing, and my cate- 
chism closed by reminding him how, years before, 
the Philadelphia papers told of his receiving a 
hundred pairs of holiday slippers, and how he 
had held up his foot at my query with a toe half 
out and a pathetic avowal, — " It 's the only pair 
I've got." 

Leaving the Seminary after our ordination as 
Deacons, he took immediate charge of the 
"Church of the Advent" in Philadelphia; a 
somewhat plainer congregation than the one he 
ministered to in the larger " Holy Trinity " parish 
to which he passed when Dr. Alexander Vinton 
removed to New York. Of his work in " Advent " 
I recollect little beyond the fact of a deepening 
interest in his sermons and in him, which rapidly 



58 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



built up the parish and drew to him many from 
other churches. 

It was my good luck to hear him there, now 
and then, and I remember one sermon, meant to 
bring comfort to hearts in trouble, which stirred 
my wonder by its insight into that world of sad 
experience of which his own life then knew so 
little. " I should like to know," I remember 
saying on the walk home after service, " where 
you learned to preach consolation to other people 
with so little experience of your own to draw 
from" : and his answer comes back to me often 
with the little preluding laugh that never hid his 
earnestness from those who knew him, " Oh, well, 
don't you think a fellow can put himself in other 
people's place and see how they must feel " ? It 
was an obvious response, — or seems so now, — 
to a pointless challenge, but a lifetime's grace of 
tender helpfulness spoke the plain secret which 
has cheered so many mourners and made his 
memory a benediction. 

Towards the end of the first year after his 
work began, he came to Wilmington, Delaware, 
where I was assisting Bishop Lee, in St Andrews, 
to attend my second ordination. He had been 
appointed my examiner, and a short half hour 
before service the Bishop asked in the robing 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



59 



room if the duty had been discharged. I am 
afraid we had both forgotten about it, and Brooks 
pleaded in self defence that our three years as 
students together seemed to make a formal exam- 
ination needless. Whether the good bishop, — 
there was never a better one, — had found cause 
or not, to doubt his assistant's soundness, the plea 
failed to satisfy him, and so with a " Come 
George," I was beckoned away to be tested. 
Once fairly out, in a passage-way alongside the 
church, he faced sternly round upon me, saying, 
"Well, now, George, how are you"? "Pretty 
well, thank you," I answered; "That will do, 
then," and we went back to our bishop — one of 
us at least greatly relieved. At this distance of 
time one can see — no doubt several can — that 
the examination should have been more strict. 

Next year the great war came. The good work 
he did, the spirit that spoke in his many platform 
addresses, ardent always, and never fierce till the 
assassination of the President struck to his soul 
as it did to the world's, — this is part now of the 
nation's story. Every one knows the stand he 
took, the inspiring influence of his words and 
acts; the strength of his faith in the final tri- 
umph which very many doubted, and not a few 



6o 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



never wished ; the fervent thankfulness that hailed 
the peace as a direct divine absolution. 

When the troops came home we went to Wash- 
ington for the great review — his dear friend, the 
Rev. Mr. Cooper, of Philadelphia, with us. We 
had often said we would go, if alive at the signal. 
And when the President whom, on those two 
proud days, the two armies saluted, lay dead in 
Independence Hall, we saw the face in its coffin ; 
as next day in New York we saw the funeral host 
move up Broadway in the awful stillness, broken 
only by the tread of feet, and the wail of the 
" Spanish Hymn." 

If such details seem out of place in a sketch 
like this, their association with Phillips Brooks 
pleads some excuse for a passing mention. 

Through those war years, we met one day in 
each week, — and half the other days besides, — at 
Cooper's table. My Germantown parish was so 
near, and the chronic welcome was so hard to 
resist, that I fear the sermons suffered. But what 
times they were to remember ! Our gentle 
hostess died long ago. She knew how we loved 
her, and I am sure Cooper knows what Phillips 
felt for him through life. Much older than any 
of us, he was at heart as young as the youngest. 
On the funeral morning he walked beside me, as 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



61 



true a mourner as the dead friend would have 
been for him, if the oldest had been taken first. 
May the thought of their long, unclouded intimacy 
cheer his loneliness ! 

The following year gave me a summer in 
Europe with Phillips. He had gone abroad soon 
after the war, and had travelled as far as Greece, 
and Constantinople, and the Holy Land, and had 
sailed up the Nile; the first of the frequent 
vacation journeys that brightened and doubtless 
lengthened his life. A sharp, imperative rap on 
the door of my room in Paris, familiar from sem- 
inary days, started me to my feet and put an end 
to my loneliness. It was not a planned meeting, 
— all the better for that; and it opened five 
months of companionship, chiefly in England and 
Switzerland. An artist friend of his in Rome, who 
knew Switzerland as well as he knew the Corso, 
had mapped a programme for him, which we fol- 
lowed through nearly two months of steady 
tramping. 

Our first view of the Alps is memorable to me 
now. I had lingered in Paris for a good-bye to 
friends just starting for Boston, and after two days 
rejoined him, July 11, in Berne. He was 
stretched out full length in a deep recess of the 
hotel-room with his window open, — it was sunset 



62 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



time, — and as I sat down beside him, looking off 
towards the lighted horizon, I exclaimed, "How 
lovely those clouds are"! He was silent, but 
something in his eyes made me look again, — and 
then I knew what the clouds were, and what his 
silence meant. He had wanted the revelation to 
come to me as it had first come to him. — The 
vision of the "Delectable Mountains " is his now, 
and we trust will be ours when morning dawns 
and the long silence is broken. 

Our route took us over eleven passes and showed 
as much of Alpine wonder of lake and glacier as 
seven weeks' zig-zagging could to men whose lungs 
and legs were ready for almost anything. The 
route is pencilled on a blank leaf of Rev. Harry 
Jones' "Regular Swiss Round," picked up that 
Spring in Boston ; a brighter book for a pedestrian's 
pocket than the officious, red-uniformed guides. 
It doesn't tell where we went, — the fly-leaf does 
that, — but it helped us with its sly humour and 
wise suggestions. 

It lies open before me now, as that summer 
does, with the sunshine in it, — dear for associa- 
tion's sake, and for the merry delight he took in 
turning its breezy pages between the climbs. I 
am not to tell the story of the summer, — too 
much like other people's summers (like no other 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



63 



of mine) to re-travel except in thought, but full of 
fresh, sad interest to-day, in the shadow of this 
year's loss. I recall his untiring industry ; how he 
insisted on starting off full swing up the side of a 
mountain, from breakfast-table to summit, — 
'Pierre a Voir,' 'Riff el,' 'Piz Languard,' 'Rigi,' — 
in spite of my panting protest against such violation 
of the laws of pedestrianizing. ' ' When I 've some- 
thing to do," he said, "I want to do it," and he 
kept to that rule through life. In those thinner 
days he was a capital climber, with a keen enjoy- 
ment of mountain view and mountain air, and a 
knack of taking everything in at a glance, — run- 
ning his eye over a landscape as over a book. 

In such busy years as his were to the last, a 
mind less alert and retentive would never have kept 
up as his did, with the literature that crowded his 
shelves and heaped his tables. 

Even in such alluring nooks as Interlachen and 
Bellagio his zeal would not let him rest, or let me. 
" We shall lose snap and get into lazy ways," he 
would say, if I wanted to linger. The longest stop 
I find in our whole Swiss " round," or "zig-zag," 
is " Schaffhausen and Constance, Aug. 23, — 27," 
and most of the entries, except Sunday ones, 
stand for a day, or a day and one night. Schaff- 
hausen brings back the jeer with which he greeted 



64 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



Baedeker's comment on the Falls of the Rhine 
there, — " considered by many travellers superior 
to the far-famed Falls of Niagara in North Amer- 
ica." His " ho ! ho ! ho ! " sounded above the mild 
roar of the waters and broke out at intervals after, 
on the faintest reminder. It was the laugh of a 
boy, big and spontaneous ; and uproarious if the 
provocation came as surprise. In the circus in 
Paris, just before the start for Switzerland, he for- 
got audience and everything at the sudden appa- 
rition of an American clown bursting into the arena 
and saluting the multitude with a joke in good 
English, which not a Parisian in a hundred could 
ever take if he tried. The clown's Yankee audacity 
won him an instant friend. It was an unconscious 
triumph, but real and for life, and it left more effect 
on Brooks than some sermons we heard that 
summer in English chapels. 

As we were " doing " the Castle of Chillon, a 
school of sight-seeing boys from Paris or some- 
where trooped in under charge of a tutor, and, 
after enjoying the horrors, trooped noisily out — 
one queer little elf lagging behind for an instant 
to say," bon jour, Byron " ! in French that broke 
into English, and that Phillips hailed with an out- 
burst like that bestowed on the clown. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



65 



The solemn invalids in soak to their necks in 
the tank at Leukerbad, sipping coffee, and knit- 
ting, and chess-playing at their floating tables, 
tickled him greatly ; as did the loss of an alpen- 
stock on which I had carved my achievements in 
the face of his contemptuous protest. " You will 
never get your stick home," he kept saying, " and 
won't care a fig for it if you do" ; and the sight of 
it leaning against a shed on the shore at Thun, 
where my forgetfulness left it, as our steamer pad- 
dled into the lake, made me the butt of his life- 
long banter. Thanks to him, that alpenstock 
stands, or leans, in my memory still, as a comical 
landmark in the perspective of twenty-five years. 

In September we parted in Paris, and he sailed 
for home. 

A year and a half later, after my own return, 
he was with me in Gambier, Ohio, at a time when 
the college had lost its head — officially speaking, 
— and with Bishop Bedell's approval he was 
sounded about taking the presidentship. His 
look, as the matter was broached, I shall not for- 
get ; how the chin dropped into the collar, and 
he stood awhile gravely reflecting. " No ! they 
wouldn't let me have free swing, and I wouldn't 
take the post unless they did." There was more 
of seriousness in the swift decision than some 



66 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



may think. He was not rector yet of the church 
that we know now was providentially meant for 
him. All the great work to be done in Boston 
was waiting in the near future, beyond his ken and 
ours. " Trinity " was not on the outlook's horizon, 
and he said then, as his friends knew he had said 
often before, that the dream of his youth was to 
be where he could reach and teach young men. 
The smile curling the lips of some who said his 
rare powers would find no field in a western col- 
lege, would have "died before it was born," if 
their imagination had seen what his saw of the 
possibilities beckoning to him from a field like 
that — such as that must some day be. 

There was nobler work to do in a field more 
sacredly, distinctively his, but the silence of those 
few minutes of thought said what the weeks of 
anxious consideration said when the Harvard 
chaplaincy, with the Plummer Professorship, was 
offered him afterwards; "for a week," he told me, 
"I thought I should go." 

He came out the next year to Clifton, near Cin- 
cinnati, to be my one groomsman, as he had been 
my one theological examiner before, and in the 
bow- window of the drawing room, where Bishop 
Mcllvaine married us, with our backs to the com- 
pany, he stood at my side looking down from the 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



67 



serene height of his bachelorhood through those 
large eyes. "Well"! he exclaimed, taking my 
hand with a sigh of hypocritic relief as the cere- 
mony ended, "I'm glad it's over. — I never saw 
anybody look as solemn as you did ; I was thank- 
ful the people couldn't see your face ; I felt like 
saying, if you feel so bad about it, why do you do 
it " ? Some men show their sympathy, — if that is 
the word for a wedding, — in one way, and some 
in another. His bubbled from the depths of a 
nature having the warmth of a woman's with all 
that is — whatever you please — in a man's. 

Such wandering memories are of interest to 
those only who knew him well (though how many 
these were !) and may have but faint interest even 
for them. 

I must hasten on. 

The vacation rambles in the White Mountain 
region, kept up for several years, ceased long 
since. He "carried weight," and came at last to 
the whimsical conclusion, that "mountains look 
best from below." The summers took him to the 
old Andover home or over sea. It was good to 
know that his sermons filled churches in London, 
and elsewhere through England, with people who 
hung on his words "in breathless suspense," as 
the "Spectator " said after his death. The critics 



68 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



gave such scholars as Canon Liddon, and such 
orators as Archbishop Magee the meed of a praise 
granted him grudgingly, much diluted with "buts" 
and "perhapses," but the verdict of the great, 
eager congregations was the same there as here, 
and not the same accorded to any preacher of this 
generation. 

A stay of a week with him in Philadelphia 
once, while he was still in charge of "Holy 
Trinity," showed me how he wrote sermons. 

" Take a book and a pipe," he said one morn- 
ing, " and let me map out work for to-morrow." 
The pen ran on as if the note paper " plan " were 
an offhand letter, and after an hour or so of 
absolute stillness the close-written sheet went 
into the desk. An hour and a half on each of 
the next two mornings turned the small sheet 
into twenty-five pages, about, as free from 
erasure and interlining as if done foi a prize. 
Next Sunday he preached it, and by way of 
getting some clue to his method, I begged after 
service for a sight of the " plan." It was the 
twenty-five pages in four, so far as thought went, 
and arrangement, with even the transitions and 
illustrations set down in hinted suggestion. The 
effect was of condensed transcript, made after the 
whole thing was done. The field had unrolled to 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



6 9 



him when he took up the pen for an outline. 
He had seen the sermon as landscape, and told 
on Sunday what Wednesday revealed. A mind 
trained to such exercise seemed to me then, and 
seems still, an exquisite, rare machine. 

But the method didn't help me much when 
back in my parish. The key wouldn't fit my 
lock. One might as well hope for inspiration by 
stealing a pen. 

The heat of our Julys and Augusts told upon 
him, as upon some who weigh a hundred pounds 
less, and depressed him at times. 

In my New Bedford rectory he once groaned out, 
"Don't you wish Summer could just be eliminated" ! 
— On another visit he surprised us by coming 
down late to breakfast, and to our "Never knew 
you late before," his reply was "I didn't want to 
get up at all; I sometimes think how good it 
would be to spend a whole day in bed, — not 
sleeping all the while, but just propped up with 
pillows, and with plenty of books and no callers." 
This was not long before the three months' jour- 
ney abroad which was spoiled by a felon, due, the 
doctor assured him, to run-down-ness. "The 
idea," he said, "of my being run-down" ! — but 
we could not echo his tone of resentful disdain. 
One of us ventured the safe remark, "The felon 



7© 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



was very painful, of course"? "Yes, rather, — 
but I can't think it was pain of the sort some folks 
boast of ; it was bearable enough ; the worst thing 
about it was the way it throbbed ; I couldn't sleep 
any, and heard the clocks strike everything, — but 
then, it was rather pleasant lying awake and listen- 
ing all night." "Well," we said, "perhaps you'd 
better call it pain, on the whole, and done with 
it" ! It is cheering to feel that he never after had 
such sharp need to argue the point, — nor presum- 
ably ever before. 

Two winters ago, boarding in Boston, we had 
frequent bright glimpses of him in our rooms, and 
frequent chances to hear him in "Trinity." 
Never before had his preaching seemed so won- 
derful, so helpful. 

He had said, while rector of " Holy Trinity," 
Philadelphia, that he dared not go into the pulpit 
without a written sermon, his extemporaneous 
addresses being invariably made from the chancel 
platform. Now, he spoke almost as invariably 
without notes, though nothing in the thought, and 
only an intenser fervor of tone and manner, 
marked the absence of manuscript. The years 
had expanded and quickened the powers. 

There was the old charm of diction and illus- 
tration, and the old unconscious mastery of the 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



7i 



art which rhetoricians teach, but had never taught 
him. What had changed was the thought, as ex- 
pression of a nature disciplined by time's teach- 
ing and by a deeper experience of life's seriousness, 
a fuller realization of its high responsibilities and 
splendid possibilities, a keener insight into hu- 
manity's spiritual wants and divine Love's infinite 
helpfulness. The sermons meant more because 
the spirit knew more, and, through that knowledge, 
spoke more directly to other spirits, as friend and 
sympathizer. All that any one can say was said 
by one of his brothers, in response to a comment 
of mine after one of the sermons. — "Yes, his 
power deepens from week to week ; he grows all 
the time." Many listeners must have felt that 
this passionate earnestness taxed his strength be- 
yond what any strength could bear. Though 
neither mind nor frame gave sign of failure, the 
vital forces, — or whatever the word is, — could 
not help suffering from such terrible, persistent 
strain. Into each sermon went a part of himself, 
his life. Meeting him just after that Easter, in 
Commonwealth avenue, he said, "The people 
are dying all about here, — and I don't feel any 
too well myself." 

Then came the election to the bishopric, with 
its after interval of weary newspaper debate over 



7* 



IMPRESSIONS : OF 



his doctrinal soundness, and the quality of his 
churchmanship. How the changes were rung ! 
and how the whole pitiful contest has shrivelled ! 

The pleas and protests did their work, we pre- 
sume. If their work was to discipline patience 
and teach charity for beings one could never hope 
to respect, it was effective, we know. 

Once, when it seemed the election might fail to 
be ratified, he replied to my cry of despondency, 
"Oh ! it will come out all right, but" (dropping 
chin into collar) "I'm mortal sick of it" ! A 
healthy nature has large capacity for nausea, be- 
cause it is healthy, but who knows what he suffered ! 
"Safe to call it pain," as in the case of that tor- 
turing felon referred to. When the process was over 
— (its slowness would have wrecked a church with 
no apostolic succession), — he said in response to 
my " I'm so glad " ! "Well, I believe I'm rather 
glad myself." He welcomed the opportunity for 
a new kind of effort in an ampler field, but his 
friends saw cause for rejoicing which they would 
not have cared to hint. 

Walking down Brattle street with him to Har- 
vard square, early this winter, I said, " Do you re- 
member introducing me to Mr. Longfellow once, 
just about here, the only time I ever saw him "? 
"Yes," he answered, "and how the great men 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



73 



have died off lately, — Browning, Lowell, George 
Curtis, Whittier, and now Tennyson" ! One more 
name is to-day on all the lips, a name written in 
heaven. 

There is small reason for thinking that the 
duties of the new office weighed too heavily on 
him. They kept him remorselessly busy indeed, 
and the list of appointments for visitations never 
made, so pathetic in retrospect now, was not 
pleasant reading before the death shadow went 
over it. The testimonies agree that it was happy 
industry, that its varied interests delighted him, 
as his presence brought sunshine to parishes every- 
where eager to welcome him. Bishops do grumble 
sometimes, and no wonder ! — but he hadn't found 
time yet to learn all the ways of the office. 

Not long before the end, he came into the train 
on the way home from one of these visits, an hour 
or two out from Boston. He had been reading 
Dr. Weir Mitchell's " Characteristics," and with 
the book in hand ran on about it, praising it 
warmly as full of keen analysis of character, and 
bearing all through the stamp of his old friend's 
peculiar genius. Talking of that, and of Aubrey 
de Vere's " Essays on Spenser and Wordsworth," 
which I had just read and he had not seen yet, 
we were in the Boston station before we knew it. 



74 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



Vivaciously charming in his sympathetic apprecia- 
tion of books and men, there was nothing to 
remind one of the years, any more than the miles, 
— nothing but the gray hair under the broad- 
brimmed hat, and some lines around the mouth 
when he smiled. If I had only known it was my 
last good talk with him ! and the invitation, so 
warmly, repeatedly pressed, to go home to dine 
with him on my way out to Cambridge, was the 
last he would give me ! But we parted at the 
station, and except for a brief glimpse at a 
thronged reception in his house, ten days before 
his death, I never saw him again. In the strong 
light beating down on his face, that reception 
night, one saw too much of the look of the worst 
of the photographs, but no hint of good-bye, no 
anything to take from the shock of the word that 
so soon, to so many who loved him, came like a 
blow. 

At the close of the last holiday letter he sent 
me (and since 1 86 1, when he gave me Tennyson's 
" In Memoriam," not a Christmas has passed 
without its gift and good wishes), he wrote, "All 
looks pleasant for the New Year. Donald is 
beginning beautifully at Trinity, and none of the 
clergy have defaulted or preached other people's 
sermons. I hope it is pleasant in the prospect 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



75 



for you. May you and M be very happy all 

its days." Alas ! not one day in this year, or in 
any new year if we see it, will be to us what it 
would have been if he had not died. 

The general grief was as when the land knew 
that Abraham Lincoln was dead, — each heart's 
own personal pain. It is too real, too abidingly 
fresh to be written about. When the Harvard 
athletes stooped to lift their precious burden high 
on the proud shoulders, and moved with it down 
the aisle, away from his chancel, and the doors 
opened to where the greater congregation outside 
awaited it, — the hearts were bowed as one heart 
under the shadow, in the consciousness of an over- 
whelming solemnity, a crisis in their own life's 
story, as in some way linked strangely with his. 
The world is not the same world to those who 
have lost him, and not the same for any who have 
come within reach of his character's example and 
influence. They have been spoken to; and, in 
the degree of their sense of Whose world it is 
and Whose message was brought them, they will 
feel Phillips Brooks's influence still. 

These swift reminiscences may seem to have 
too much of the warmth of eulogy in them ; but 
one must " look in the heart and write," or not 
write at all. As years went on, others may have 



76 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



come closer to him ; none honored him more, or 
could give warmer reason for honoring him. The 
real question for each who knew him is not "What 
did he think ofjwu"?, but "What do you think of 
him"?, and my heart's answer to that could have 
been spoken, as now, any day in the thirty-six 
years. 

I am glad there are so many of us speaking to- 
gether, that the single voices can hardly be heard. 

He was not a great theologian, not a great 
logician, not a great orator even, as men count 
oratory. He was genius, with a great soul to in- 
spire it. To attempt formal analysis of the genius, 
the character, would cost me the reader's sympathy 
and my own self-respect. 

Simplicity is the word oftenest applied to the 
man, as to the sermons, but the word does not 
speak the whole truth about either. It never 
speaks the whole truth of a soul any more than of 
a style. The sermons were simple. Men of all 
grades of intelligence understood what he said. 
The blank ignorance that confronted him in the 
mission-station near Alexandria, — and I can con- 
ceive nothing blanker, — took the truth from him 
as the thoughtful hearers did in Holy Trinity, 
Philadelphia, and Trinity, Boston. But the 
thoughtful discerned the " deep lying under." 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



77 



Deep called to deep. The language was of 
every day ; the thought was his own, the very form 
of it part of his brain and his being. 

Earlier in this paper his art of rhetorical expres- 
sion was hinted in passing. It was unconscious 
art, if there is such a thing, and it was as distinct- 
ively his as his voice. None matched him for 
generalship ; the power to marshal meanings and 
move to results, to keep to the point and gather 
in illustration and argument, — argument not the 
less real for being invisible, — and so reach the 
conclusion by the one way that was surest, letting 
subordinates go, or stay as subordinate. Listen- 
ers, — some listeners, — called it all simple. No 
one found it simple who went home to write. 
Imitators were safe from suspicion, except as bor- 
rowers of manner and tone. The blunder of taking 
idiosyncrasy for character, or mannerism for style, 
is as weak and as common as the failure to recog- 
nize one's own doctrinal belief in the fresh shape 
which an earnest intelligence, a deep-thinking 
experience give it. Phillips Brooks suffered from 
these blind judgments, as much as one could who 
concerned himself little with either carpers or 
copiers. He spoke as he lived, from the soul, and 
the character's example is the one thing to study 
and imitate. 



78 



IMPRESSIONS OF 



Not to dwell upon what is as clear to most of 
us as his thought was to all, may we not say that 
the secret of his power, of the blended strength of 
the many powers, was that the truth he preached 
was intensely real to him. He held it because it 
held him. The whole man held it, and the whole 
life lived it. Call it faith, for it was, but faith 
winged by a wonderful imagination. The Christ 
of history was as real to him as if their hands had 
touched. There was nothing between, no 
distance. His heart went to Him. He spoke as 
seeing Him who is invisible, as having been with 
Him each day in the companionship of trust and 
love. 

There is no telling how much a spiritualized 
imagination can do for a man to make any great 
truth real ; and when the truth realized is twofold, 
— of a Lord always near, a Presence, a Person, 
an incarnate, loving Evangel, — and of a Human- 
ity needing help and worth it and willing to re- 
ceive it, aspiring to become what He is eager and 
able to make it, — when this is the truth the 
spiritualized imagination is possessed with, we 
may not wonder at the work it does or the joy it 
finds in doing it. 

The "evidence of things not seen" defines 
faith and defines the power that reaches faiths. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



79 



It tells all we shall ever know of how Phillips 
Brooks learned to " put himself in other people's 
place," and think and feel and hope with them as 
if the sorrow were his, as the trust was that tri- 
umphed over sorrow when it came to himself. 

It is good to feel that his influence did not die 
with him. The sermons have passed into the per- 
manent literature of christian experience. They 
will preach when our names are forgotten. The 
remembered life abides. He was a living protest 
against the weak tyranny of the conventional, 
traditional, commonplace, — as his Master was; a 
voice of hope and appeal in "the clear dawn of 
an ampler day," which he steadfastly believed in 
and did his life's best to hasten. 

The opening text of A Kempis' "Imitation 
of Christ," and of his own last published volume, 
expresses the doctrine he always preached, and 
the fact his happy experience realized. "He 
that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but 
shall have the light of life" 

It was an illuminated experience, a lighted life. 
We of this generation may not count upon another 
like him for teacher and friend. 

Geo. Aug. Strong. 



The Clericus Club, 





83 


'HRHE Clericus Club began its existence 
in Phillips Brooks's study, which then 
was in Hotel Kempton, Berkeley street, 
Boston, in the Autumn of 1870. He was 
its first President, and continued to be so 
until his election to the Episcopate in 1891. 
The Club holds its meetings the first 
Monday of every month, save from July 
to October. Rarely have meetings been 
omitted, and then only for weighty cause. 
The unwritten rule was to meet with Dr. 
Brooks, first at his study in Hotel Kempton, 
afterwards in his home in Newbury street, 





84 






and later at his rectory, Clarendon street. 
Necessarily there were exceptions to this 
rule ; but the recognized home of the Club 
was with Dr. Brooks. After he became 
Bishop, members took their turn in enter- 
taining it; yet, as his duties permitted, he 
was always in attendance. He was present 
at the January meeting, 1893, three weeks 
before his death, for the last time. His 
spirit of catholicity still guides it, as his 
presence during his life was its inspiration. 



85 



Founders. 1870. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

RUFUS W. CLARK. 

C. A. L. RICHARDS. 

ARTHUR LAWRENCE. 

WILLIAM W. NEWTON. 





87 


Original 


Members. 1 870-1873. 




Wm. R. Huntington. 


Edmund Rowland. 




A. V. G. Allen. 


Leonard K. Storrs. 




James P. Franks. 


Henry F. Allen. 




Charles H. Learoyd. 


Rt. Rev. Thomas M. Clark, D. D. 




George L. Locke. 


Treadwell Walden. 




Henry L. Jones. 


James H. Lee. 




Charles C. Tiffany. 


C. G. Currie. 




Percy Browne. 




E. D. Tompkins. 







89 


riembers, in Order of Election. 






David H. Greer, 






Nov. 3, 


1873 




*Frank L. Norton, . 






June i, 


1874 




*Francis Wharton, . 






Nov. 2, 


1874 




James Haughton, 






Nov. 2, 


1874 




Theodosius S. Tyng, 






Nov. 2, 


1874 




Reginald H. Howe, 






Dec. 7, 


1874 




Louis De Cormis, 






Dec. 7, 


1874 




*Charles H. Ward, . 






Oct. 4, 


1875 




Charles H. Babcock, 






Feb. 7, 


1876 




William Lawrence, . 






May i, 


1876 




*Darius H. Brewer, . 






June 5, 


1876 




-George Z. Gray, 






June s, 


1876 




Samuel R. Fuller, . 






Feb. 5, 


1877 




George J. Prescott, 






Mar. 5, 


1877 




Alexander Mackay-Smith, 






Apr. 9, 


1877 




John C. Brooks, 






Feb. 4 , 


1878 




H. C- Cunningham, . 






Oct. 7 , 


1878 




Leighton Parks, 






Nov. 4 


1878 




Leverett Bradley, . 






Nov. 4 


1878 




George A. Strong, . 






May 5, 


1879 


: 





91 


F. B. Allen, ...... Dec. i, 1879 




T. A. Snively, 






Jan. s, 1880 




L. C. Stewardson, . 






Feb. 1, 1880 




Frederick Burgess, . 






May 3, 1880 




Augustine H. Amory, 






Dec. 6, 1880 




George S. Converse, 






Feb. 7, 1881 




*E. MULFORD, . 






May 2, 1881 




Reuben Kidner, 






May 1, 1882 




Frederic Courtney, 






June 5, 1882 




Samuel Snelling, 






Dec. 4, 1882 




Charles P. Parker, . 






Feb. 5, 1883 




H. S. Nash, . 






Mar. 5, 1883 




C. M. Addison, 






May 7, 1883 




A. H. Vinton, 






June 2, 1884 




Endicott Peabody, . 






Mar. 2, 1885 




H. Evan Cotton, 






Mar. 5, 1888 




Roland C. Smith, 






Jan. 7, 1889 




John S. Lindsay, 






Nov. 4, 1889 




Frederic Palmer, 






Mar. 3, 1890 




Arthur C. A. Hall, . 






Mar. 3, 1890 




W. M. Grosvenor, . 






April 4, 1892 




E. Winchester Donald, 






Dec. 5, 1892 




*Deceased. 





Officers of the Clericus Club. 



93 



PHILLIPS BROOKS, 
PERCY BROWNE, . 

WILLIAM W. NEWTON 
PERCY BROWNE, . 
LEONARD K. STORRS, 



PRESIDENTS. 






1870 — 1891 




1891 — 


CLERKS. 






187O— 1875 




1875 — 1889 




1889 — 



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